BreakPoint | Marcia Segelstein | Jan. 21, 2008
You visit the local mall with your children tagging along, and the biggest worry you should have is where to find the best bargain. The last thing you want to have to worry about is those youngsters seeing images you wouldn’t allow in the privacy of your own home. Enough is enough—and I’m ticked.
If you are the parent of a teenager, and you live within driving distance of a mall, chances are good that you have visited an Abercrombie & Fitch or Hollister store sometime in the recent past. Their brands are the hot ones at the moment, at least among all the 14-year-olds I know.
Besides selling popular clothes to young teens, Hollister and A&F have some other things in common.
First, they’re owned by the same parent company, Abercrombie & Fitch.
Second, they are purveyors of soft-core pornography to children.
Let’s start with Hollister. This is a store targeted to the 14-18 year-old-set. But when I walked into one of their stores recently, prominently displayed on their brightly-lit magazine rack at the check-out counter, was a copy of Maxim. Truth be told, a few months ago I’d seen the same thing (different issue). At that time, I’d complained to the store’s manager who referred me to the “customer service” phone number. I dutifully called to register my complaint. And it’s not as though I had any expectation that one complaint would make a difference, but seeing it for a second time still featured among their reading material put me over the top.
For those of you unfamiliar with Maxim, one look at the cover and you would know all you need to know. On the cover of the current issue, an actress is posed seductively, clad in a lacy black bra, leggings and high heels worthy of any prostitute in Times Square. So what is this “men’s” magazine doing in a store selling clothes to 14-year-olds? And in case you’re wondering, the magazines aren’t for browsing: they’re for purchasing.
I asked if there was any age restriction on the sale of Maxim, and the answer was an unapologetic “no.”
And then there’s Abercrombie & Fitch. Once famous for their high-end sporting goods, the store was bought out in 1988 and “repositioned” as a “casual luxury” lifestyle brand. It’s now aimed at teens and the collegiate set, and plenty of kids on the younger end of that scale can been found poring over racks of pricey tees and henleys. Abercrombie & Fitch doesn’t sell pornography — at least not any more. They display it on their walls for free.
According to Wikipedia, Abercrombie & Fitch “markets through means of sensual photographs in ‘grayscale,’ many taken by Bruce Weber, known for his sexually explicit photography.” But you wouldn’t need a description from Wikipedia to know that. You’d only have to walk into one of their stores.
Two larger-than-life posters I happened to see were particularly offensive. One, hanging inside a dressing room (where you couldn’t miss it if you tried), showed a young man, naked from the waist up, lying on top of a young woman, also naked from the waist up. It was shot very carefully so that certain body parts weren’t fully exposed.
Another, hanging prominently on the wall near the cash register, showed a similarly clad (or should I say unclad) couple standing together. The young man’s arm was positioned to expose all but the barest minimum on the girl’s bare front.
Abercrombie & Fitch’s propensity for pornography is nothing new. A few years back, they published a “magalog” (a kind of hybrid magazine and catalog), which was sold in their stores. Called “Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly,” it included articles, photographs, and interviews, along with displays of their merchandise. Trouble is, the photographs, articles, and interviews were sexually explicit. The final straw was the 2003 Christmas edition which, according to newspaper accounts at the time, included page after page of naked models along with written material extolling the virtues of group sex and orgies. One photo was described as showing mostly nude models sleeping cheek to cheek under Christmas trees, surrounded by wrapped presents. Ad copy on one page read: “Sex, as we know, can involve one or two, but what about even more?” And one article offered advice on three-way sex.
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